Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (84 page)

The experience of the poverty and suffering in what Rocker called ‘Darkest London’ rapidly disproved for him the idea, held by some revolutionaries about the condition of the poor, that ‘The worse, the better’. He believed, to the contrary, that if people suffer terribly, they become demoralized and are unlikely to have the strength or inclination to fight for social emancipation. It was this concern and sympathy which enabled him to become accepted by the Jewish community. But he also helped galvanize them into action. When he turned
Arbeter Fraint
into a daily paper during the successful strike of sweatshop workers in 1912, he won the respect of thousands. He later recorded his experiences amongst the Jewish community in his lively autobiography
The London Years
(1956): ‘I gave them all I had to give, and I gave it to them gladly, for there is no greater joy than to see the seed one has planted sprout. They were devoted to me because they saw that I was honestly devoted to them, that I was working with them, at their side, as one of them.’
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It was during his years amongst the Jewish Anarchist Group in Whitechapel that Rocker met his lifelong companion Milly Witcop. True to their anarchist beliefs, in 1898 they preferred to be turned back by the US Immigration Authority rather than go through the ceremony of a marriage imposed by the State. When they did eventually marry, it was on their own terms.

During the First World War, Rocker was interned in Britain as an ‘enemy alien’. He was deported in 1918 and went back to Germany. He became a leading figure in the syndicalist International Working Men’s Association which was set up in 1922 and which had its International Bureau in Berlin for the next decade.

Rocker was a competent and profuse writer. He defended the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution in the pamphlets
The Truth about Spain
(1936) and
The Tragedy of Spain
(1937) and produced an incisive account of
Anarcho-Syndicalism
(1938). His most important work was undoubtedly the monumental
Nationalism and Culture
(1937), completed shortly before the Nazi’s seizure of power. Forced into exile again, he finally settled in the United States. His opposition to fascism led him to support the allies in the war against Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship. He also wrote
Pioneers of American Freedom
(1949), to remind his new compatriots of the depth and breadth of their own libertarian tradition. He died in 1958, aged eighty-five.

In his
Nationalism and Culture
, Rocker tried to present an outline of the causes of the general decline of our civilization, the most important of which being power politics. He offered a searching analysis of human culture and institutions throughout known history. It is the most important anarchist
treatment of the subject; Rocker’s standard of value is always the utmost possible freedom. The work was widely hailed as one of the great books of its time; Bertrand Russell, for instance, considered it an important contribution to political philosophy on account of its analysis of political thinkers as well as its ‘brilliant criticism of state-worship’.

Rocker insists that the nation is not the cause, but the result of the State:
‘It is the state which creates the nation, not the nation the state.’
At first sight this might seem strange since there are many ‘nations’ which are colonized and seek to create an independent State for themselves. But Rocker’s position becomes clearer when he distinguishes between a ‘people’ and a ‘nation’. A people is the ‘natural result of social union, a mutual association of men brought about by a certain similarity of external conditions of living, a common language, and special characteristics due to climate and geographic environment’. On the other hand, the nation is ‘the artificial result of the struggle for political power, just as nationalism has never been anything but the political religion of the modern state’. A people is always a ‘community with rather narrow boundaries’, whereas a nation generally encompasses a whole array of different peoples and groups of peoples who have ‘by more or less violent means been pressed into the frame of a common state’. Nation-States are therefore
‘political church organizations’.
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Rocker rejects the idea that a nation is founded on communality of language as an arbitrary assumption since peoples change their language, and nations exist with different language districts. He also repudiated race as a delusive concept since it is merely an artificial classification of biological science and only humanity as a whole constitutes a biological unit, a species. Not surprisingly, Rocker felt that all nationalism is reactionary since it enforces artificial separations within the ‘organic unity’ of the great human family.
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Cultural nationalism according to Rocker appears in its purest form when people are subjected to a foreign rule, and cannot for this reason pursue their own plans for political power. For Rocker ‘home sentiment’ is natural and acceptable for it is not the same as patriotism or love of the State. Only when it is mixed with ‘national consciousness’ does it become ‘one of the most grotesque phenomena of our time’.
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Rocker’s principal thesis is that States create no culture. In this he placed himself within the important if minor German libertarian tradition. He admired Nietzsche for his views of the State, the decline of German culture, and the Apollonian and Dionysian spirit in art. He also appreciated Humboldt’s ideas regarding the limitation of State action and his view that freedom is the basis of human progress and culture. Developing their ideas, Rocker argued that political power and culture are irreconcilable opposites;
the former always strives for uniformity, while the latter looks for new forms and organizations. It follows that ‘Where states are dying or where their power is still limited to a minimum, there culture flourishes best.’
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Culture gives man consciousness of his humanity and creative strength; but power deepens in him the sense of dependence and bondage. Indeed, Rocker compares the contest between power and culture, State and society, to the motion of a pendulum which proceeds from one of its poles — authority – towards its opposite — freedom.

Rocker however is no social ecologist. He defines culture as ‘the conscious resistance of man against the course of nature, to which resistance alone he owes the preservation of the species’. The process of culture is therefore ‘only a gradual mastery of nature by man’.
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The Nation-State has destroyed the old community and has turned gradually all social activity into an instrument to serve the special ends of organizations for political power. Rocker makes the characteristic anarchist point:

The great problem set for our age is not the government of men, but the administration of things: ‘It is not so much
how
we are governed, but
that
we are governed at all.’ Whether in the form of State socialism or State capitalism, Rocker argued that there is no tyranny more unendurable than that of an all-powerful bureaucracy.

In place of government and the State, Rocker proposes federalism as ‘the organic collaboration of all social forces towards a common goal on the basis of covenants freely arrived at’:
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While rejecting ‘positive’ law made by governments, he accepts ‘natural’ law which existed before the growth of States and which is the ‘result of mutual agreements between men confronting one another as free and equal, motivated by the same interests and enjoying equal dignity as human beings’.
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In an epilogue to
Nationalism and Culture
written at the end of the war in 1946, Rocker called for a real federation of European peoples as the first condition for a future world federation. Despite the rise of fascism and the defeat of the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain, Rocker was confident that ‘just as there was once a time when might and right were one, so we are now apparently moving towards a time when every form of rulership shall vanish, law yield place to justice, liberties to freedom’.
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Rocker’s social philosophy took off from the teachings of Kropotkin. He argued that modern anarchism is a confluence of the currents of socialism
and liberalism and may be regarded as ‘a kind of voluntary Socialism’.
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It is not a patent solution for all human problems but believes in ‘an unlimited perfectibility of social patterns and human living conditions’. It strives for the ‘free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life’.
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Freedom is valuable not because it is an absolute goal but because it enables this process to take place.

Rocker defined anarchism as an intellectual current ‘whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions in society’. In place of the capitalistic economic order, anarchists would have ‘a free association of all productive forces based on co-operative labour’.
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The State on the other hand is ‘the defender of mass exploitation and social privileges, the creator of privileged classes and castes and of new monopolies’. He concludes that the liberation of humanity from economic exploitation and political oppression, which is only possible through the ‘world-philosophy’ of anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.
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Rocker saw anarcho-syndicalism as the most relevant form of anarchism for the twentieth century. He rejected political struggle since all the political rights and liberties enjoyed by people are not due to the goodwill of their governments but to their own strength. Anarcho-syndicalists are not against political struggle — they fight political suppression as much as economic exploitation — but they see that the struggle lies not in the legislative bodies but in direct action, particularly in the form of the strike. Although opposed to militarism, Rocker was not a pacifist, and accepted the need for a determined people to fight for their freedom. The workers, he argued, ‘can regain their rights only by incessant warfare against the dominant powers’.
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He defended the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and the fight against Franco and his troops. He also supported the allies in the war against Nazi Germany. Towards the end of his life, he took a more reformist stand, but he never lost the vision of a free society which he found in the writings of the great anarchist thinkers as a boy.

T
HE
MOST
IMPORTANT
AND
outstanding libertarian thinker to emerge in India this century was undoubtedly Mohandas Gandhi. On several occasions he called himself a kind of anarchist and always opposed the centralized State and the violence it engendered. In a famous speech in 1916, referring to India’s violent revolutionaries, he declared that he too was an anarchist, ‘but of another type [than the terrorist kind]’.
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Gandhi’s particular form of libertarian philosophy was strongly influenced by several Western thinkers. A reading of Tolstoy’s
Kingdom of God is Within You
in 1893 inspired him to practise non-resistance to violence, but he went on to develop his own highly successful technique of nonviolent direct action. In a South African prison in 1907, he found further confirmation of his approach in Thoreau’s essay on
Civil Disobedience.
From Ruskin, he learned that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all and the life of labour is the life worth living. He was particularly influenced by Ruskin’s
Unto This Last
and translated the title as
Sarvodaya
, welfare for all. Finally, it was from Kropotkin that he elaborated his vision of a decentralized society of autonomous village communes.

But despite the Western influences, Gandhi’s anarchism is deeply embedded in Indian philosophy. He attempted to reconstruct an ancient tradition of Indian religious thought which depicts man as a divine being capable of perfection and of self-discipline by internalising moral norms. His appeal to all classes and groups was based on a metaphysical belief in the cosmic unity of all beings. Central to his world-view were also the principles of
satya
(truth),
karmayoga
(self-realization through disinterested action),
varnasramdharma
(the Hindu law of right conduct), and above all
ahimsa
(non-injury or non-violence). But the most revolutionary aspect of Gandhi’s teaching was undoubtedly his social and political interpretation of
ahimsa
in which he turned the principle of individual self-realization into a principle of social ethics. He also drew on the traditional Indian values
of village life and the joint family and the practice of making decisions by consensus.
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